Automation of procedures has advanced dramatically in recent years. However, many times procedures come to a standstill because there are not enough personnel available to observe and/or perform something that needs to be performed.
As an example, when renting a device such as a container tracking device to a customer there are often personnel problems involved with getting the device promptly returned for reprogramming or for forwarding to a next customer wanting to use the device. The problems may be lack of customer personnel to accomplish the return procedures involved, packaging the device properly, getting the correct address on the packaged device when forwarding, contacting a delivery service to pick up the package and so forth.
As another example, theft of assets through removal from a container or even theft of an entire container is becoming increasingly common. When the theft occurs in a truck stop parking lot, often the thieves disconnect the trailer from the tractor and reconnect to their own tractor. They try to do this with minimal noise and the forces, termed herein as an event signature, are quite different from the very fast and typically noisy operation involved when the procedure is accomplished after forcing the stopping of a truck on the open road. At times, pallet moving devices, such as powered forklifts or manually operated units, are used to transfer assets from a hijacked truck to another vehicle. The event signature forces and sensor triggers involved when such a transfer occurs are reasonably reliably differentiated from other event signature forces applied to a container using appropriate motion analysis circuitry and/or pattern recognition algorithms as applied to a series of sensed force values. Since the truck driver, and even additional security personnel associated with a given delivery, may well be incapacitated by the thieves, the driver and/or these additional personnel cannot be relied upon to quickly report the theft.
It would thus be desirable for a device to be smart enough, through the use of sensors and artificial intelligence to determine or otherwise ascertain that the device has accomplished (finished) an assigned task and then, in the case of the first example supra, to notify a delivery service directly using M2M (machine to machine) communication to pick up the device for transfer to another destination. As part of the notification it would also be desirable to include details such as whether or not the device needs to be packed in a container by the delivery service, the minimum container size required, the destination, the party to be charged for the delivery, the priority to be assigned to the delivery and so forth. It would also be desirable that the device could transmit, as part of the notification data, one or more forms to, as examples, cause a printer to generate a shipping label and/or an invoice for delivery of the asset to which the device was attached whereby the delivery service could drop off the invoice when picking up the device for delivery to the next destination.
In the situation of the second example, it would be desirable to be able to use a monitoring device to determine that event signatures associated with removal of assets from an attached container at a location other than one or more predefined unloading locations or other event signatures that are typically indicative of the theft of the entire container, is likely to constitute a theft situation whereby the monitoring device has completed a job function when contacting appropriate authorities that theft is likely occurring. Additionally, it would be desirable to be able to alternatively instruct the monitoring device to take other or further theft countermeasure action such as triggering the operation of one or more cameras, spraying the assets with a dye, activating an audible alarm, causing the dispersing of a debilitating gas cloud and so forth in order to complete the job function.